Jean Spence,Sarah Aiston and Maureen M. Meikle,eds,Women,Education,and Agency,1600–2000

Reviewed by: Jane McDermid, University of Southampton, UK

As the editors declare in their preface, this book is the result of the fifteenth annual conference of the Women’s History Network held in Durham in September 2006, which gives the reader some idea of how long it takes to compile a collection of 14 chapters written by scholars based in Europe, India and USA. Whereas the brief preface by the editors and the foreword by Carol Dyhouse do not explain why these particular papers were selected from what was a large programme, the essays themselves, arranged chronologically, cover a long enough period and provide an interesting mixture of themes, individuals and groups, to underpin the key factor of female ‘agency’ in women’s education.

These 14 chapters are short, reflecting the limits of the 20-minute presentation format from which 13 of the contributions have been developed; but they are also supported by detailed references. Each contribution conveys both a sense of the ways in which women, even very conservative ones, have striven to improve their own education and that of other women by subverting, negotiating and challenging the obstacles in their way, as the introductory chapter by one of the editors, Sarah Jane Aiston, succinctly summarizes. The following contributions provide specific, empirically based case studies while also engaging theoretically with the notion of ‘agency’. Given the length of the period covered, much of women’s education, especially before the nineteenth century, was invisible, private and domestic. The book discusses women and formal schooling: Marianna Muravyeva on the women who, denied a university education in Russia, studied at European universities, notably Zurich, from the 1860s until the end of the century; and, a century later in the USA, the establishment and achievements of women’s centres at institutions of higher education charted by Sylvia Ellis and Helen Mitchell. However, there is more of a focus on women’s ideas about the need for a serious education, reflected in the chapters covering the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries: Joyce Senders Pedersen on the educational legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft, Stephanie Spencer on Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education in England, and Barnita Bagchi on the educational writings of Pandita Ramabai and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain in India. In addition, there is examination of women’s efforts at self-education, as in Barbara Bulkaert’s discussion of Anna Maria van Schurman’s intellectual achievement in seventeenth-century Europe. The relationship between women and the ‘masculine’ subjects of science and mathematics is explored by Ruth Watts who considers the contribution scientific women made to English culture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Claire Jones who focuses on Cambridge University around the turn of the twentieth century. Feminism and the politics of education is the subject of the contributions by Jane Martin (on London’s feminist teachers and their claims to citizenship in the first half of the twentieth century), Aynur Soydan Erdemer (on the involvement of Şükufe Nihal in the modernization of twentieth-century Turkey) and Linda Eisenmann (on the centrality of education to the writings of the American feminist Betty Friedan and the challenge she posed to President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1961). Katherine Storr’s discussion of international women’s organizations between 1918 and 1930 shows how they could win support from prominent men for education for peace but not for equality; however, her suggestion (182–3) that the former might have succeeded had it not been for fascism and Hitler seems rather facile, an aside acceptable perhaps for a conference paper but not for a scholarly publication.

All contributors show that however well educated a woman became, she was still considered to have trespassed into the masculine sphere; indeed, whereas some women made significant contributions to the development of a discipline, for example as Anne Logan shows in her chapter on feminist criminology in Britain between the 1920s and 1960s, they were often later sidelined and pigeon-holed, in this case to the ‘welfare’ of women and children, while the male criminologists dealt with the ‘bigger’ issues and occupied the more prestigious and better-paid positions within the justice system.

Of course, education does not necessarily transform the position of women, while some see education as a means to reinforce the status quo, but it still raises questions about the expectations of women: as Erdemir concludes of her study of Şükufe Nihal and the shaping of the Turkish Republic, ‘she accepted the role of women in the family but raised serious and important questions about the ways in which constructions of femininity thwarted the development of serious, thinking women’ (143). Over the four centuries since 1600, there was a great deal of continuity (in terms of exclusion and social censure of the intellectual woman, reflected in attitudes towards and provision for female education), as well as some change, and the cumulative effect of this collection could be depressing. Yet, overall, the theme of women’s agency is inspiring, whether through formal or informal education, individual effort or collaboration. This collection is a valuable addition to the Routledge Research in Gender and History series, as well as a valid assertion of the role of women in educational history.